FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER doesn’t just have a title that rhymes. Jim Jarmusch has made a poem about family relationships. In three chapters that work like three stanzas, adult children visit their parents. At first glance, the stories don’t have much in common besides the basic constellation, but like quiet echoes, small, recurring events, sentences and thoughts run through the film, connecting the scenarios. A few skaters go by on the sidelines of every episode, like migratory birds, en route at a different flow than the protagonists that navigate the strange standstill that family visits can be like. The non-time between the years, the non-place of a former home, the non-being between the self one is now and the self one used to be.

The encounters which Jarmusch films with quiet humor are imbued with gaps. In the first episode, Emily (Mayim Bialik) and Jeff (Adam Driver) visit their father (Tom Waits) in the US outback. You can tell that they don’t visit often, they have nothing to share about their everyday, and the conversation seems to be avoiding unnamed obstacles. What role did the dead mother play in the family constellation? Does the father need care? Who takes care of how much? Money is also a topic hanging in the room which is only talked about indirectly. The visit is short. In the second episode, which is set in Dublin, sisters (mousy: Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (punky: Vicky Krieps) visit their mother (Charlotte Rampling), a formidable bestselling writer, to let their resentments shine through over an elegant pre-Christmas cup of tea and keep their secrets to themselves. The most relaxed are siblings Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat), who, in the third episode, visit their deceased parents' apartment in Paris one last time.

Jim Jarmusch’s most recent film is relaxed, a bit funny, and astoundingly comforting. Jarmusch looks at the secrecy and the unspoken in mid-functioning family, not merely as a defect, but also as an unavoidable, indispensable feature. In the gaps between family members, individuals manifest, free space is defended and conflicts are postponed while at the same time they uphold the promise and the possibility of overcoming these gaps. To allow for them and endure them is a part of love.

Hendrike Bake (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy